


The Asides

by Souja



Series: They were kids that I once knew [3]
Category: BIRDMEN - 田辺イエロウ | Tanabe Yellow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 22:00:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18170375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Souja/pseuds/Souja
Summary: Here's the thing about the Birdmen taking flight: For the people in that building, it must've been a regular night. Until, of course, it wasn't.





	The Asides

**.Aside.**

...

 

 

A stain of inky black blotted out the sun, and the Autumn night began early for a certain Karasuma. No, not the one that perused the sky with his newly affirmed _friends-as-family_ , but a Karasuma nonetheless.

  
She’d family in middle school, but ignore him for a moment. Ignore everything about that particular family except that Karasuma was employee to an office in the middle of Tokyo. Yes, this goes where you think it will.

  
As far as offices went --not very far at all, if they had a construction crew worth their salt-- it was just one of many in a building about thirty stories high. Below them ran an insurance company that prided itself on being only a _little_  bit seedy. Above, a publishing group that allowed its workers to wear casual clothing, and sometimes had pizza shared with the late night staff. Above that was a different company she didn’t know, but whose people were wont to drag their feet while invisible hoses siphoned energy right out of them. (She swore, more than once, that there was no light to their eyes.) She cherished the pizza and politely held her tongue when the zombie shift came about. Something about their bent backs and sagging shoulders felt a bit too much like home.

  
Her office was on the twenty fourth floor, with a job that chained her to a tiny cubicle from the hours of nine till five. The work was simple, monotonous. All the information came and went in carefully organised codes, and her part was only to order, reorder, and send them off. If she suffered any trauma from having no clue what she was working with, it was covered by a weighty cheque at the end of the month.

  
Life was good for Karasuma, even without the wings.

  
At least, until the night when worked finished at five, but she stayed till eight. The night when she punched the last few digits of code into the orange-backlit screen and stood for a moment, feeling her body pop in appreciation of the movement and the culmination of a job well done. The night when she stood near the water cooler, filling her water bottle and chatting with the pizza delivery guy (who was kind of an office hero), laughing because he was _cute_ and--

  
Suddenly she was struck by knowledge in lists.

  
Firstly, Seraphs loved freedom. It pulsed around her mind, chasing away her other thoughts till there was nothing more than the harsh sound of reality rewritten. _Love freedom. Seraphs love freedom._ Of course she’d known this. It was crystal clear to her, just the same way her mind overlayed birdmen with seraph.

  
Secondly, Seraphs valued nothing from their human past. Why would they, and be chained by silly human idiosyncrasies? (Her mind quickly did away with the theory she’d held to, that said the birdmen were aliens. It pulled blocks between the those connections, detouring them down other neural highways.)

  
Finally, the seraph negotiated not with things of the past, but with their gazes pointed towards the future. And that thought took longer to settle, because there were no connecting qualities to it. She’d never met a seraph as far as memory served, and in what parody of reality would _she_ have the pull to _make deals_ with them, anyway?

  
A number of articles she only vaguely cared about, and barely even remembered, suddenly rewrote themselves as her brain made sense of the information. Within seconds it was just...fact. Fact she’d always known, duh.

  
(Karasuma was lucky. Because the Birdmen had no ties to her job, not directly, anyway, there was no big mess to be made of axons or dendrites. Of course she'd read about it somewhere. _Yeah, yeah_ , her mind lied to itself, _she'd definitely read that before._ And just like that, the lie became memory.

  
This was not the case for Chiyoko Shiba, or Kai Shinichi, or a number of others who'd context and meaning for the codes Karasuma put in aimlessly. Especially not the overworked pair that compiled information to create profiles for the main branch. No, they were gifted a sudden overwhelming anxiety as things that had become a begrudging pride gnarled and twisted to awful failures.

  
They’d begun the day to terms with their actions and ended in despair of the faulty false-truth that their careers were built on lies and their families, _their poor families_ were in danger. Their eyes were opened to the system they’d played to salve their consciences. Only time would tell before someone looked and exposed their _inadequacies_ \--)

  
But, it began on a Karasuma, and it ended just the same.

  
Karasuma left the floor with her bag over her shoulder. The pizza guy saw her off with a simply breathtaking three-medium-pies-for-the-price-of-one smile.

  
(So. cute.)

  
She listened to her favourite station on the bus ride back to her home, where someone would no doubt be waiting. She stopped part way through, though, suddenly annoyed with the speaker she’d adored the day before. The dumbass kept spouting nonsense about the Seraphs, talking about them like they were normal human beings. 

  
Her body lied to itself that it was just the stress, and because it'd become so very good at doing so, it accepted that as truth.

 

.


End file.
